WHY DO THE OLD TV sets in the living rooms, garages, kitchens or at the cottages of millions of Canadians deserve to go digital?
As the transition to digital over-the-air TV deadline grows closer and the industry is awakening to the need to act, the question has been asked in some quarters: Why bother?
We can keep fibbing if we want but as an industry we already know it’s now impossible to update our over-the-air television broadcasting system to digital by the August 31, 2011 deadline set years ago by the CRTC. Not “virtually impossible.” Not “challenging.” It is not possible to make our over-the-air TV system digital by that day. No way. No how.
I’ve read a few of the submissions to the CRTC which were due yesterday for “CRTC 2010-169, Call for comments on issues related to the digital television transition” and that fact is undeniable.
We might be able to at least make the transition along the Canada-U.S. border – as the Americans are expecting us to do. A consumer education campaign on the switch to digital in Canada can certainly (we hope!) be ramped up in advance of next summer, too.
But, should we even bother with doing anything else? We haven’t done much so far, so why do anything? The major broadcasters plan to simply shut off transmitters serving small rural communities on 08/31/11 (like Salmon Arm, B.C.), keep the analog ones on in many larger ones away from the Canada-U.S. border (Sydney, N.S. for example) as long as they can and switch to digital (maybe) in the communities they have to (markets of 300,000 and above, plus provincial and territorial capitals).
Some (like me, for instance) believe we need an American-style coupon program to help Canadians pay for digital OTA receivers for older TVs – and for the federal government to foot the bill for the CBC’s complete digital conversion, at the very least. We also must explore the idea of multiplexing and other creative thinking where broadcasters can share resources in regions where it makes no economic sense to go digital OTA.
If Telus and Bell can build a new wireless network together, surely the likes of CTV and Canwest can work something out together?
Some are whispering other ideas. There is a small faction among some of the industry’s thinkers who believe we should hold fast to the deadline, enforce the analog shutoff and let the sh*t hit the fan and spread as it will. At 08/31/11, we’d just send Canadians who insist on keeping their old TVs or sticking with OTA TV the address of the nearest Best Buy, cable company or, if they’re rural folks, the toll-free numbers of Bell TV and Shaw Direct.
Despite what we all think about how few Canadians use OTA TV, this would cause an unprecedented public relations disaster. Many times larger than the negative option fiasco of the 1990s.
(It’s worth noting too that some of the more hard core deadline keepers are also suggesting that if Canada’s broadcasters want to stay analog, they should be paying cash for the spectrum rental for every day past the deadline they are analog and not digital.)
During the Law Society of Upper Canada’s biennial conference on communications law and policy two weeks ago, former Bell ExpressVu head Gary Smith was the first one with the courage to bring up “do nothing” as the potential Plan B for the digital TV transition in Canada. Although he added he doesn’t recommend the do nothing option, just that it’s a possibility.
Stateside, the transition to digital television began in the 1990s under the Clinton administration, noted McGill professor Greg Taylor at the same conference. He is surely not one of the Plan B advocates and did his doctoral thesis on the subject. In Canada, we’ve done nothing but watch the Americans work hard and squabble in front of our Regulator over this and other things, he noted.
“Over-the-air broadcasters are at the heart of the transition to digital television,” said Taylor. “The centrality of media to a healthy democracy and access to TV signals is intricately connected,” and without ensuring that the poorest Canadians maintain access to basic OTA TV and the information and entertainment it brings, we’ll all become less engaged as Canadians.”
And the fact that there has been no industry urgency or political will to lead the transition leaves Canada “at a crisis,” he added. (At least the government has decided which ministry is in charge.)
Smith, too, said he worries about the harm the digital switch may cause “to the least able members of society” and noted the CRTC has repeatedly pleaded with the industry to come up with its own solution to the digital migration in the name of a “market-based” approach, but “ultimately, it didn’t go anywhere,” so we’re now likely to see “a regulatory solution imposed on the industry, and I’m predicting the broadcasters are not going to like it very much,” said Smith.
He also noted the recent fee-for-carriage/value for signal ruling actually creates a disincentive for local broadcasters to build OTA facilities where instead it will make more economic sense to wait to get paid for their signal, sent terrestrially, and just dump OTA distribution altogether.
“The motivation to find a solution has gone away,” added Smith.
American communications lawyer Brendan Holland, after hearing at the conference what’s ahead of Canadian broadcasters and the compressed timeline pronounced himself relieved the transition was over in the States and proud of how government and industry handled it there. He also added though that if the U.S. broadcasters had delayed this long, and given the economy, “they would not want to face doing this in 2010-11.”
He reminded the regulatory folks there that the U.S. industry dramatically underestimated the number of people who would need a digital OTA converter, and cautioned the Canadian industry not to make the same mistake. “There were substantially more than people expected,” he said. (The FCC expected to give out about 20 million coupons. They gave out 34 million.)
The CRTC here projects that about 900,000 Canadian households rely on OTA TV.
From the Canadian broadcasters’ point of view, the digital conversion is money they do not want to spend and now that they’ve left it so long, finding the equipment and people to build many more new broadcast facilities by 08/31/11 just isn’t going to be possible.
Confirmed broadcast tech consultant Wayne Stacey at the Law Society conference: “Let’s pretend broadcasters can find (the money) to build the transmitters and assume the CRTC and Industry Canada can issue fully approved DTV applications every working day… it will still not be possible to take these approvals, complete site access arrangements, order equipment, install and test and so on,” he said.
In the end, this isn’t about old TV sets. It’s about people (Consumers to those of you in the industry. Voters or taxpayers to those in government). It’s about Canadians who can’t afford an upgrade. It’s about not leaving Canadians behind as the world moves to digital. It’s about how as long as broadcasters are using a public resource, spectrum, Canadians should be able to receive the TV on that spectrum.
“To eliminate the obligation within the system to provide service for all Canadians would be to entrench a digital divide for which there is little justification,” writes professor Taylor. Broadcasters have been granted spectrum for television broadcasting with the proviso that the public be compensated for its use. “In Canada, that reimbursement has traditionally included universality of access.
Finally, the government, Regulator, the carriers and the broadcasters themselves regularly tout conventional OTA television as the “cornerstone” of our industry. I’ve bought that so far.
A cornerstone, however, traditionally supports everything else in a building. Without it, everything else around it will crumble.
All of which means “Do Nothing” is not an option.
